application development

One of the largest development communities on earth has started to move its bare metal mentality into the world of virtualization, and the stakes have never been higher. To support this massive technology shift, Rackspace has built tools that help developers bring web or application development to the Rackspace Cloud.

Several weeks ago, I flew out to San Francisco and got to talk with a lot of developers about their applications and the cloud. There were three points that almost every developer brought up: scaling their app, initial deployment and feature requests.

Many of our prospective Managed Cloud customers are interested in migrating to the open cloud, but some could use a hand getting there. Our Rackspace Cloud Ready team was created to help save you time, and we have assisted many customers with migrations over the past several years.

There are five essential pillars of cloudiness. In this recurring blog series, we’ll count down from No. 5 to No. 1. Last time, we looked at modular design. In this fifth and final post, we discuss parallel computing.

When an app chokes on an unexpected condition or data, developers can spend hours going down rabbit holes trying to reproduce and diagnose the issue. It helps to have as much information as possible about the error and the environment at the time of the error, so that’s why I want to look at the error reporting and monitoring tool called Airbrake. This tool lets you get into the guts of your application’s errors to see what is going on.

You’ve worked hard on your application and are gearing up for a major event. You’ve heard me talk about the power of the cloud API, and have incorporated it into your app to control cloud infrastructure, in particular to scale up your configuration in a short amount of time. But before the big day comes, there is one important point to remember as you plan for a high traffic event.

As many developers and businesses begin looking at the cloud, one question that often comes up is, “What are the steps to migrate my on-premise application to the cloud?” After working on Rackspace’s Cloud Ready team for the past two years, I found that these tips can help you as you begin your journey to the cloud.

There are five essential pillars of cloudiness. In this recurring blog series, we’ll count down from No. 5 to No. 1. Last time, we looked at scaling horizontally. In this fourth post, we discuss modular design.

When you host your app in the cloud, you want to make sure that the infrastructure that runs it is up and available. Cloud Monitoring is an easy way to monitor your servers to ensure they are performing properly. In particular, there are two methods of monitoring my app’s servers that I always set up: ping checks and HTTP checks.

As a developer who has worked both at a startup and for Rackspace, I know the importance of monitoring. The worst thing is finding out that your app is down from a tweet or email from your end user. In addition to the performance of the app, it is also helpful to know the cost that you are incurring. While the pay-as-you-go utility pricing of the cloud has enabled many entrepreneurs to get their app up and running, forgetting to spin down servers that you put online for a short burst of time can end up biting you. That is why it is important to monitor these three things: physical infrastructure, application health and spend.